Ellen urges you to engage people more by using your webcam, and I slightly disagree.

Do you like to see webinar presenters on camera? I often don’t (at least not the whole time), because the webcam can be distracting. But Ellen’s post has a link to a short recording where the webcam feed was relatively small and unobtrusive, in the top right:

Did you enjoy Ellen’s use of the webcam in that example? I did, and I liked that there was plenty of room to see her gestures (as the webcam was in widescreen mode), which helped keep me engaged. She also had an abstract artwork behind her, which gave visual interest (yet didn’t draw my eye too much).

I wonder if that video’s shortness (just 15 minutes) is also a factor in making the webcam easier to watch? When you present a webinar, it’ll likely be far longer than 15 minutes, and your webcam feed might be much bigger. Both those factors could increase the risk of your webinar becoming too tiring for people to stay focused on it.

Hard way: The better approach is to poll your audience about your webcam (that is, at least until you get a feel for whether most people like webcams), which helps to meet your audience’s need for democracy.

For instance, your poll question (and answer choices) might be:

When would you prefer to see me on webcam during this webinar?

All the time

More than ½ the time

Less than ½ the time

Never

Using a poll gives each person in your audience a say in shaping your webinar, and lets you please most of them most of the time.

What’s more, it helps them all understand why you’re using your webcam a certain way – even if they don’t like it! (Ideally, webinar platforms should let each attendee choose whether to see the presenter’s webcam. But sadly, they often don’t.)

If you’d like to read more on the pros and cons of using your webcam in webinars, also check out To cam or not to cam? by Donald Taylor.

She mentions a wide range of interactive options, and (as I mentioned above) variety’s one of the best ways to keep people focused. As Ellen puts it:

“As with any presentation, you need to do change ups regularly,
but do them more often during a webinar”

So true!

One thing I’d say about interaction though is that many webinars rely heavily on polls, yet to me most polls aren’t engaging. So if you use polls, I urge you to ask questions for which the results will either:

Fascinate your attendees (not just mildly interest them).

Help them solve a pressing problem.

Ellen says:

“Use polls to inform yourself about the audience’s views and to inform the audience about the views of other audience members”

Even when you’re answering audience questions (for several minutes), it’s wise to keep showing new slides, so people always have something fresh to look at. To do that, try a technique I call stop Q&A hypnosis.

You can show a slide that looks incomplete and then gradually reveal the rest of it. That’s similar to my earlier suggestion to use builds, and it intrigues your audience about what you’ll show next, which keeps them paying attention. It’s helpful when you display a chart, diagram or other relatively complex visual, and it lets you show the relevant parts of the slide as you mention them, so people keenly follow every word.

You might like a related tip suggested by Roger Courville (a webinar veteran), too. In the 2nd tip in this post by Roger, he suggests you use a slide as a visual or written “punchline” (to complete a partial sentence you say).

By the way, here’s a really handy extra tip (from me), for use when you’re watching recorded webinars (or other videos) yourself. Ellen called this tip “pure gold” when I shared it with her. (I’d found it when I was frustrated that there’s no built-in way to speed up playback on vimeo.com.)

You might find this tip useful to speed up Ellen’s recording, because it works with many videos, not just ones on Vimeo. For instance, I’ve also used it to speed up videos by Emma Sutton on Facebook. You can use it in most browsers, too, like Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer. It goes like this:

A quick comment about using polls. The suggestion to use polls to adjust your webinar to meet people’s need looks like an interesting idea, but unfortunately many webinars are either pre-recorded, or the accompanying slides need to be pre-uploaded. This means that in most cases it is very difficult, if not impossible, to change the flow of your presentation on the fly.

If a webinar’s recorded with an audience watching, the presenter could poll those people about the order of topics. Then when you watch the recording, you’d see why the topics appear in the order that they do. (Whether or not there’d been an audience originally, the host would ideallysplit the video into separate recordings (1 per topic). So when you watch afterwards, you could choose the order you want.)

If the slides are pre-uploaded, many webinar platforms still let you jump to slides out of order. For instance, when you present with GotoWebinar, WebEx, or Adobe Connect, you can display a slide list (that the attendees don’t see), which lets you present slides in any order. Or, your webinar platform might support hyperlinks between slides, in which case you can click those to jump between topics.

It’s certainly not an easy technique, but its difficulty is balanced by the hugely positive impact it can have on the event (and on the audience).

By the way, if you’d like to watch an example of a non-linear webinar, check out Ken Molay’s recording in this comment.